Posted
by
timothy
on Monday November 02, 2009 @12:18AM
from the in-related-news-no-easter-egg-hunt dept.

coondoggie writes "The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency today offered up a rather interesting challenge: find and plot 10 red weather balloons scattered at undisclosed locations across the country. The first person to identify the location of all the balloons and enter them on the challenge Web site will win a $40,000 cash prize. According to the agency, the balloons will be in readily accessible locations, visible from nearby roadways and accompanied by DARPA representatives. All balloons are scheduled to go on display at all locations at 10:00AM (ET) until approximately 4:00 PM on Saturday, December 5, 2009."

Obviously, this is just an attempt to use crowdsourcing to find a bunch of lost weather balloons. In this day and age of gov't budget cutbacks, every balloon saved is a slightly bigger performance bonus at the end of the year...

There's no real point to it. Here's what they did: There are five balloons around, numbered from 1-5, and four balloons numbered from 7-10. Just like the prank where you release a 3 pigs, painted with a "1", "3", and "4" into a high school.

I wonder what the agenda here is. It's surely not something as simple as finding how many people jump in their cars and go driving.

FTFA:

The DARPA Network Challenge is designed to mark the 40th anniversary of the Internet. "It is fitting for DARPA to announce this competition on the anniversary of the day that the first message was sent over the ARPANET, the precursor to the Internet," said Dr. Regina E. Dugan, who made the announcement at a conference celebrating the anniversary. "In the 40 years since this breakthrough, the Internet has become an integral part of society and the global economy. The DARPA Network Challenge explores the unprecedented ability of the Internet to bring people together to solve tough problems."

But honestly, this discussion would not be nearly as amusing without the paranoia of/. getting turned up to 11.

The possible things come to mind:Gather intelligence on how quickly people are able to come together to form a working group, and what the structure of the group is likely to be.

Find new and interesting ways for this sort of huge area recon. Can a geek use roadway cameras effectively? Are there other ways of gathering this sort of information?

Test some software that they have written to trawl the web searching for specific words among the randomness of the intertubez.

Any other ideas come floating to mind?

I was going to post the same question and propose items 1 and 3. I was going to compare this to the intentional disinformation we sent in WWII using encryption we suspected to be compromised -- it gave us excellent intel on the ability of the axis to deploy a fighting force. It fits nicely with the idea that in sociological testing it is important to disguise the actual nature of the test, so that the respondents do not alter the outcome (consciously or subconsciously).

In that case, you've just broken their experiment.

But then, perhaps that is not what they are observing. Perhaps they figured out that we would figure out the actual meaning of the challenge, and what they are actually measuring is the rate at which we perceive the actual intent of the challenge...:)

Either way we could have a lot of fun with this, we just need a few red balloons and volunteers to be "DARPA agents". Yes, of course we could just post disinformation, but wouldn't it be more fun to get participants to post disinformation with conviction and confidence be behind it? F'en with people is so fun.

Either way we could have a lot of fun with this, we just need a few red balloons and volunteers to be "DARPA agents". Yes, of course we could just post disinformation, but wouldn't it be more fun to get participants to post disinformation with conviction and confidence be behind it? F'en with people is so fun.

OK, good to go -- I've just ordered three red weather balloons on eBay.:)

Regardless of what their intentions are, they're gathering data on us. How we react, how quickly, how cohesively, whether we react at all, etc. That's the thing about sociological experiments; they always produce data.

The data will be useful. It won't help bring a man to Mars, or fight terrorists in Afghanistan, but it will be useful in some way, shape or form. What they may then do is, based on the responses or lack thereof to this challenge, modify their next sociological experiment to hopefully attain a

* Observe how they communicate with the search teams, coordinate efforts, and disseminate data.

This could be used to coordinate efforts between the military and civilians, should the need arise. In the sake of the great terrorism debate, what if a vehicle was known to be in the US, and it is expected to detonate a nuke on US soil. This kind of crowdsourcing would have a better chance of finding it than putting everyone in the law enforcement and intelligence communities on the road hunting.

Unfortunately, this is probably organized towards the handling and neutralization of civilian unrest inside the CONUS. It would:

* Identify civilians who can organize large groups to neutralize them.
* Identify communications routes that would need to be neutralized.
* Identify intelligence breaches that could be used by the dissidents.

So, it's all in how much you trust our government. Would they recruit the civilian population to assist in a time of need? Would they neutralize dissidents during a period of civil unrest?

I'm fairly confident I'm not on the stage 1 list (neutralize in the first hour), but I'm pretty sure I'm on the stage 2 list. I'd suspect the organizers who aren't LEO or government will be on the stage 1 list. The followers will be on the stage 2 list.

Who wants to play the game now?

If I happen to spot a red balloon, with a couple spooks camped out below it, I'm going to plink at it with a BB gun.:)

The "trawling for information" idea is an easy one. Set a Google News alert for it. You can specify it to provide notifications for other things like website updates. I've already gotten a few, but they were all talking about the contest, and how it could be subverted.:)

I'm just trying to figure out where to buy an 8 foot red balloon. Since I already know the risks associated with being identified as a contestant, I'd rather play the other side, and give people a false target. I

It's kind of the point: "In the 40 years since this breakthrough, the Internet has become an integral part of society and the global economy. The DARPA Network Challenge explores the unprecedented ability of the Internet to bring people together to solve tough problems."

That's probably the point. DARPA wants to demonstrate empirically that mobile communications have reached the point where ordinary people can coordinate using ordinary technology to achieve what would historically have needed to be a fine tuned professional intelligence operation.

That has some interesting applications. Whereas it might take hundreds or thousands of UAVs/aircraft to locate these balloons, a sympathetic population might very well be able to do it for a fraction of the cost and risk. Who knows, maybe the next time we're occupying a country the military might give out free cell phones to generate a little good will and put the population to work finding our enemies.

It also could have been done in a period where each town had a telephone. Really, we could have done it during roman times, It would of course take longer to send messages when we found them. The only new advantage the internet gave is oddly enough getting the message to so many people at the same time.

Anyone with access to satellite imagery?
If you have a satellite camera, you could open a website,"FindDarpaBallons.com" and pay people who find the balloons 500$ each to report them to you. Then just use your Satellite to confirm it. Send in to Darpa, make 40k, pay out 5k, and be up 35k.

Most major roadways (at least in my moderately sized city of around 4 million) have traffic cameras all up and down them that are freely accessible. I'm guessing this would be a valid strategy - run image analysis on all of the traffic cams you can get your hands on for red balloons.

Wouldn't surprise me if this is what the purpose of the contest is - to get someone to develop this software for them.

This contest absolutely is not about using technology to coordinate, as is roughly implied in DARPA's statement

The DARPA Network Challenge explores the unprecedented ability of the Internet to bring people together to solve tough problems.

That is, it's not about disparate strangers coordinating quickly, as might be useful in, say, a natural crisis like an earthquake or hurricane or missing child, but networks of social trust. If they just wanted to see how fast people could put together an ad hoc information network, I bet they'd get less wrong answers submitted and the right answer submitted much sooner if there were no prize involved - people would be free with the information because it would just be a game. There'd be no incentive for deception or secrecy.

I'm guessing DARPA doesn't care about that. That's why they've got $40k on the line- not to promote communication, but to promote disinformation. They don't want to know who can build a network with modern technology, they want to know how people will build a network of trust when there's a serious incentive for betrayal.

I'm guessing DARPA doesn't care about that. That's why they've got $40k on the line- not to promote communication, but to promote disinformation. They don't want to know who can build a network with modern technology, they want to know how people will build a network of trust when there's a serious incentive for betrayal.

Betrayal is also a function of who makes up the ad hoc network, that is whether it is truly spontaneous and ad hoc among the general population or whether it arises within an existing network. My bet is that if the prize is won at all, it will be within a network that already exists. The general population is too diffuse and unorganized to gather all the data and organize and filter it.

Therefore you can examine various groups and their characteristics and determine the odds of betrayal. For example, if the B-tards decide to go after the prize, the odds of betrayal are essentially unity. (But their self generated noise level would probably prevent them from winning.) If the Boy Scouts decide to do so, the odds of betrayal go way down. (Bit I don't know if the Boy Scouts have the reasonably centralized and connected communications network need to make this work.)

I was thinking it is more to test their abilities to filter and monitor internet traffic patterns related to a particular event. How much do you want to bet Echelon will be scanning for the words "red" and "balloon" during the challenge?

Possibly to determine if they are able to focus in on an unknown individual who has managed to acquire certain specific information in a timely manner. I could see many anti-terrorism implications in an experiment of this nature.

While the internet public at large is attempting to mobilize to find the red balloons, DARPA will be monitoring the 'net attempting to stay on top of an unknown number of organizations comprised of an unknown number of individuals coordinating using unknown protocols and communications channels. This will be valuable information similar to finding and shutting down terrorist cells. Expect the front-runner group to be infiltrated by a covert DARPA agent and some key people to "disappear" until after the dead

- Prepare, plan and hypothesize ahead of time - not really possible with a non-manufactured event.

- Create a unique situation, making the experiment easier by reducing the amount irrelevant information that will be turned up looking for info relating to the event.

- As others have said, this has a social experiment aspect to it as well - who will win with such a big incentive for betrayal? A small well-organized group, or an aggregator site that grabs loads of possibly usele

If the problem is who gets the prize..And that's the stumbling block, preventing widespread collaboration..Set up your collective to donate to a charity, or the EFF, or Cowboy Neal... or something worthwhile.

Go on.. it'll be more fun than a LUG meeting.

How hard can it be to mobilise tens of thousands of Nerds..

(Unless its really windy.. these suckers arent getting to Australia.. so I cant help..)

You'd still have to trust your teammates not to screw you over once the payment is issued. I might play this game for a 40k prize, but I'm not likely to play for a small share of 40k I might never receive even if I win. Given the time I'd have to spend on this, I probably get a better expected payoff just by going to work.

Well, it's obvious why DARPA would care how quickly the internet can become aware of accurate and specific information such as 'where is unit X'.

What I'm curious about is how much mis-information could pop up. What if you mischievously set up your own balloon, that looks identical to the description, as a distraction to other teams/groups?

What if groups eventually find all the balloons - and there are 13 of them? Is it then time to unleash the perl scripts on DARPA's submission form? So many possible strategies and counter-strategies - but are they actually all just intellectual, or will they play a role in the challenge?

I think the best way to attack this problem would be to agree to donate the profits from the award to some worthy cause, letting people with the capability volunteer some time to a solution. Its a fairly complicated problem to solve for the amount of money given to solve it.
Lets say a group of capable programmers united for lets say an open source project develop a website that takes in the coordinates in the format required for the contest. The trick is going to be figuring out who is telling the truth when it comes to submitted data... You may be able to assume that if a number set is entered often that it is a candidate to be the real location. The task obviously requires coordination of many life humans as I doubt anyone that can compete has access to satellite time to do an automated search.
I am wondering how many people will attempt to put up fake balloon sites to either trick their competition or just get some publicity of tech people to come visit the site and take a GPS reading.

Maybe the real game is to try to disrupt those groups searching for balloons. Does DARPA still have enough control to stop groups forming and co-ordinating via twitter/mobile phones/etc? For every civilian team searching for balloons, there is a military team trying to stop them communicating? Watch this message disappear in a minute or two...
BTW, balloons make the perfect symbol because DARPA love The Prisoner [wikipedia.org].

The beauty of this is that it could be a lot of things. If some American official someday leaks "this is why we really did this" the odds that I would discount spin can't be over 50%, which relegates this to a quasi-permanent bucket of unknowability. It's a rare thing when a lightening bolt momentarily catches the men behind the curtain with a ruse in flagrante. The Soviets had their washer microphone. The Americans had the thermohaline undersea acoustic channel (where I live, a couple of decades ago, a

I'd say it's a bargain. Think about all the driving and snacks, hell, maybe even consumer gadget purchases this contest will inspire. Those have gotta be worth something to the economy. Maybe the next stimulus package should be a scavenger hunt.

The average person may think that $40,000 is a lot... but it's nothing in terms of operating budgets for even medium sized companies.
From the Darpa site, looking at their unclassified budget for 2010 ( http://www.darpa.mil/Docs/2010PBDARPAMay2009.pdf [darpa.mil] ) (That's a PDF, by the way, and also has numbers for 2009 and 2008), you can see that the budget easily runs into the billions of dollars.
For a comparison, forty thousand dollars is 0.004 PERCENT of one billion dollars. To someone with a salary of seventy five thousand dollars a year, the equivalent percentage would be 3 dollars. That's barely pocket change, and it assumes a budget much lower than the actual operating budget of DARPA. Taking this into consideration, that's pretty cheap. Especially if they're planning to study anything by doing this (and if you think they wont get SOMETHING useful out of this, then you're even denser than I am), that's a relative bargain. Even if they DON'T get anything worthwhile out of this contest, the publicity alone is probably worth it when you consider possible recruits that they attract because of increased interest.
Your claim that they are 'wasting taxpayer money' is pure FUD, and, to be honest, even if it wasn't, $40k isn't even a drop in the bucket of the 2.3 TRILLION dollars that was collected in taxes in 2008.

SCENE: PENTAGON STAFF ROOMMil Contractor: "And so you see, with our latest satellite imaging systems, we can search and pinpoint the location of a human-sized target object within 10 days for a nation the size of the US or Russia."Dumb General: "Wow. We need to spend some billions on this."Smart General: "Pff. I bet you could do better by plain old "boots on the ground" spywork. You'd need a pretty big network of observers though..."Smart 5-star general: "Well, boys, let's find out."

at least, this is a good enough story that I *hope* it's what's going on...

To mark the 40th Anniversary of the Internet, DARPA is hosting the DARPA Network
Challenge, a competition that will explore the role the Internet and social networking plays in the
timely communication, wide area team-building and urgent mobilization required to solve broad
scope, time-critical problems.

Each satellite images about 1 million km^2 per day, so in 250 days, they can image the entire planet at high resolution. But they'll do the populated parts of the US more often (they can aim the cameras for each
pass), so they will pick up many of the balloons.

Microsoft Bing is buying all the data, so it's going on line. The data rate is about 50GB/hour. Start programs looking for red dots.

I dunno. It seems decidedly... non-trivial. Better hope the balloons aren't in any parking lots or too close to roads, or near rooftops, or over racetracks, or in reddish deserts, or above a red car in a red parking lot in the desert, below a high-flying red bird in a superman cape.

So pray tell... how are you going to filter out every single red VW bug from your data without filtering out your balloons too??? This is a way bigger problem than a satellite can handle... you have to shoot your cameras up, not down.

I'd be willing to bet that it's actually an attempt to encourage probing/attacks on it's website/network. $40k is a pretty good incentive to try and find the answer sheet. Possible goals range from your traditional smoke-out-the-troublemakers-by-having-an-archery-contest to using it to identify skilled individuals for recruitment.

I bet it's a social experiment, not tech. There are all sorts of obvious ways to get people to work together, but how can you eliminate bad actors and false data?

If you have a central clearing house, the data can be stolen by others. If the submitted data is kept private, then the participants need to have a high level of trust in the central organizers. You also need to be resistant to spoofing from other parties, including potentially organized efforts by other groups trying to win the prize.

So I just registered a website, and will set it up in a few days... if you are the first person to submit a correct balloon location, and if we get the 40k, I will paypal $3,000 to the first email address on the submission.

If some folks want to pile into a 172 and go flying around San Diego County/Southern California/anywhere else we can get to from here armed with binoculars and split the cost 4 ways I'm game. I'm not sure what our chances of actually spotting anything would be though.

A few more datapoints here: We can reasonably fly anywhere between 1000 and 12,500'. We can fly anywhere between 60kts and 180kts depending on what airplane we want to fly (those are just the ones I reasonably have fast access to).

Bring good binoculars, fly high, and scan as much ground as possible as fast as possible? Fly just high enough that we can recognize weather balloons?

Anyone got a red weather balloon or red object of equivalent size we can set up in a field somewhere soon and experiment with? We c

Not at all. The Cessna 210 I usually fly has a useful load around 1500lbs. 90 gallons of fuel weighs 540lbs. That leaves 960lbs left for flight crew and passengers. I weigh 165. That means I could take myself plus 3 265lb slashdotters. And that's just a Cessna 210. There are much bigger planes.

Anyone else noticed DARPA's recent major marketing/publicity campaign? There is now this well-publicized balloon hunt. There was the televised robotic vehicle challenge. Even very recently, DARPA was central to the plot of an episode [cbs.com] of NCIS: LA. Its research efforts [scientificamerican.com] have been given very visible press in magazines such as Scientific American. (Look here [scientificamerican.com] for another recent SA article about DARPA research.) DARPA has also been featured twice on 60 Minutes in the past few months. And, it now has quite a fo [facebook.com]

Unless a technological approach using sattellites, automated analysis of flikr photos etc.. quickly wins out then presumably the ballons will end up being seen by some people aware of the contest. So suppose you have seen a balloon and wish to use that knowledge to claim part of the prize. What do you do?

Well what you want to do is find a group of other people who have located the other balloons and agree to pool your info in exchange for shares of the prize. Importantly nothing in the rules prevents

You know, at first, I thought this was going to be some valid balloon chase, where we would be finding balloons that had actually been released into the atmosphere, until I read "...and accompanied by DARPA representatives.". Er, how is this a balloon "hunt"?!? What the fuck is the point in finding balloons DARPA already knows the location to?

Gee, I just love paying taxes for shit like this. Makes paying thousands for finding the gazillionith obscenely-large-prime-number(EFF) look like a Warren Buffet in

Strange that nobody has mentioned it yet, but I guess it's a good bet that there will be hundreds of red balloons rising on Dec 5. Besides the obvious "because we can" motive, if you are after the prize money, it makes sense to launch a few decoys the location of which is only known to yourself. Even a few of those and the contest is no longer about spotting the balloons, but about picking the correct 10 out of the confirmed sightings.

It would have made a lot more sense to launch the balloons before announc

Dear Robbie.h.wilson,
Hello, I represet a cosortum which has found nine of the baloons in question. If your baloon is the tenth baloon, you to win $5714.28 ! Please to visit this website and enter your accounts infomations for your electronic payment. http://balooncontest.darpa.gov.example.com/ [example.com] We look forward to hearing from you. We all want to win our $5714.28

I was thinking about that possibility, maybe they should put codes on the balloons and allow people to verify their sightings online, although that could cause the event to end faster than DARPA would like. Right now you presumably have to go to the balloon's anchor point and talk with the DARPA staff there to verify a sighting (and that's nothing that can't be faked with some social engineering, especially since with the balloons spread far apart to encourage online participation, one person will be unlike